5 Ways to Improve Your Website Grader Score

Recently we wrote about the Website Grader challenge thrown down by one of our marketing savvy clients: take a brand new website and get a Website Grader score of 90.

And while many people get their site graded, most don’t know what to do next.

So here are 5 specific strategies you can implement today to improve your Website Grader score – and ultimately drive more traffic and business to your website.

1. Go for the low-hanging fruit

Fixing simple on-page SEO factors such as trimming your metadata tags and aligning your keywords to your content can bump up a failing site and move it from a score of say 54 to 80.

Registering your domain name for more than a year is another easy way go to the head of the class.

2. Drive Traffic to the Site

To really drive improvements in your WG score, you need to increase web traffic. This is often the biggest SEO challenge for a new site.

There are some great articles out there on how to drive traffic – check out Copyblogger’s guide to some of the best for ideas.

3. Attract Links

Link love is good for SEO, and what’s good for SEO is good for Website Grader.

Lots of inbound links build the authority of your site and will help bring your score up there with the big boys. To get the links, you need quality content that’s useful to people.

Which leads us to tip #4…

4. Blog for SEO

It’s no secret that blogs are great for helping to boost your SEO rankings. They’ll also help your WG score.

As HubSpot notes in their blog, blogging is the quickest way to generate lots of keyword dense, well-optimized pages for a website. And people are more likely to link to an interesting blog post than say your ‘company overview’ page. This creates link love.

Some of the best WG scores go to websites that are in the top 0.01% of blogs tracked by Technorati. To get your WG score up there – and get more people to your site – you need to blog and (RSS) feed to get the links growing.

5. Get Social

Last but not least, support your SEO efforts with Social Media Marketing (SMM) to build links, increase your sites visibility, and boost your WG score.

Social media sites like Digg, Mixx, Del.icio.us; social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook; forums; blog communities – they can all help you build links just by using them while also getting your content out there for other people to discover and link to.

Comments

I totally agree.. Blogging for SEO is a great idea. Everyone needs to do it..
Interesting concept to grade a Website. I'm going to try it. I will let others know about this so they can perform a tuneup as well. Thanks for sharing. :)
Thanks for the strategic tips for Website Grader. I strongly agree about having high quality content on your website that is useful to people to increase your inbound links.
I recently created a blog for seo practice and I successful too. I also agree that the blogs are best for seo. Link Building
I've been using the website grader like mad. It really has helped with our seo!
I think the absolute best way to generate traffic is by branding, not by SEO'ing. By branding, you are spreading your site by word of mouth. Word of mouth marketing (or viral marketing) is, in my opinion, the best way to gain recognition, and this even goes beyond SEO. Take a look at Craigs List. The site is very sloppy, and not properly SEO'd, however the site is well known and it is one of the most visited sites on the internet.
Blogging is probably the top SEO tool I use with my clients after onsite optimizations. It is the best way to publish regular content and (as you mentioned) establish keyword rich pages on the website. Great post, thanks!
Great article. Thanks for sharing!
If you are going to put a blog up to improve your Website Grader Score be sure to do the sub domain folder as www.blog.your_url.com to guarantee that your blog will show up in the Web Site Grader calculation
There are other ways to drive traffic other than SEO. Paid search, which is the reason for organic search in the first place, is a great alternative to not only drive traffic, but high quality traffic as well.
Directory submissions are also important. If you can get a few links in the Dmoz directory, this is a big win. Of course submitting into other smaller directories are encouraged, but one link in Dmoz means your link will populate across all other directories who use the Dmoz index. A paid listing in Yahoo is another great way to build your SEO score. It is a bit costly, and if you are not guaranteed inclusion, but it is a once time fee, and if you get in, a link in the Yahoo directory is quite authoritative.
Here are two to add 13 points 1)"Registering your domain name for more than a year" can get 3 extra points of 100. e.g. 76 of 100 will be 79 of 100 after renewing the domain. 2)Adding a blog and put RSS at front page gives 10 points. Thanks for sharing.
In my opinion, articles can be a good source of attracting quality traffic to your site. You can include a link to your site in the Resource Box. I myself have been getting a great response from this strategy.
How about emarketing? If you run a social site, you acquire sign ups. Every time someone signs up for the site, they leave behind an email address, which is "opt in". You can take advantage of this list and send an email blast every month or so to generate traffic to a particular page of your site.

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